Kenneth Branagh's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the reboot of the reboot of the reboot of author Tom Clancy's CIA analyst who somehow always finds himself in the crosshairs, is a Cold War espionage drama trying for 21st century relevance. It may take place in a post-9/11 world, but its scheming Russians, hardy Americans, and blandly urgent score are virtually timeless. This thriller isn't alarming, it's reassuring. Alec Baldwin played Ryan in 1990's The Hunt for Red October, followed by Harrison Ford twice with 1992's Patriot Games and 1994's Clear and Present Danger, then Ben Affleck with 2002's The Sum of All Fears; the character is either compulsively fascinating or essentially archetypal. As played here by Star Trek's new Captain Kirk, Chris Pine, the answer is drifting towards the latter. In an era of enhanced intelligence operatives, Ryan is meant to be a brave everyman with a smart brain - chances are, Jason Bourne didn't write a dissertation entitled Liquidity Events in Post-Soviet Markets. An economics student who joined the US Marines, Ryan's recruited by Kevin Costner's mentor figure, Will Harper, to infiltrate Wall Street and spot money laundering. Even after Ryan's sent to Moscow, where a terrorist attack is being plotted that will derail the American economy, this movie is small in scale, although never intimate or palpably intense. It has neither Bond's swagger nor the high-tech set-pieces of the Mission: Impossible series, and by way of compensation a game Keira Knightley as Jack's girlfriend Cathy, who is unaware of his real employer, can't add a great deal of emotional gravity. Branagh does a good job as the villain, brutish oligarch Viktor Cherevin. Both he and Ryan are Afghanistan veterans compelled by patriotism, but the material doesn't suit him. His directorial career was resuscitated by 2011's Thor, where his Shakespearean knowledge informed the classical thunder, but his work here is clipped and anonymous.Throughout, Pine stares intently and suggests Jack's unease at the unsavoury new demands of his job, but I'm not sure he has the unvarnished charisma of a leading man. The Star Trek movies allow Pine to play a leader whose weakness is his ego and unchecked emotions, and here his performance is interesting when it hints at cruelty and